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VB Reads...Motherhood By the Book

Motherhood by the Book is led by Claire, VB staffer, mother of a 7-year-old, and stepmother of an adolescent.

The book group meets on the second Sunday of every month at 2pm on the mezzanine level, next to our poetry section and near the Book Fare Cafe, for an hour of spirited discussion of books that celebrate the trials, tribulations, and rewards of motherhood, and what it means to be a mother. This group is by no means exclusive to moms with kids still at home. We will read fiction and non-fiction, older and newer titles, all with the theme of Motherhood. Join us!

The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes--sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous--Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery.

Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave a baby as an offering to the witch who lives in the forest. But the witch in the Forest, Xan, is kind. Xan rescues the children and delivers them to welcoming families on the other side of the forest, nourishing the babies with starlight on the journey. One year, Xan accidentally feeds a baby moonlight instead of starlight, filling the ordinary child with extraordinary magic. Xan decides she must raise this girl, whom she calls Luna, as her own. As Luna's thirteenth birthday approaches, her magic begins to emerge--with dangerous consequences.

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills.

Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote.